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“A major BC writer in the 1970s and 1980s, Stan Persky (at left) has died. The author of over 20 books, he co-founded the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement that led to the formation of New Star Books.FULL STORY

 

You don’t know Jack

Artist Jack Shadbolt left behind a vast archive of writings now turned into the memoir he never got around to publishing.

October 24th, 2024

Former art critic, Susan Mertens, lives in Lions Bay, BC. Photo by Max Wyman.

Author Susan Mertens explores the life and work of Canadian artist Jack Shadbolt, revealing his creative journey through personal journals, letters and poetry, offering insight into his artistic vision and personal struggles.


Born in England and raised in Victoria, Jack Shadbolt (1909 – 1998) was at the centre of a group of progressive artists and architects in Vancouver in the latter half of the 20th century. He produced paintings and drawings that resonated across Canada with their bold new interpretation of what “great art” could be.

Yet for years, little was known about his inner thoughts and what drove him—until now. Former art critic, Susan Mertens has gathered together excerpts from Shadbolt’s personal journals, letters, talks, interviews and writings, many of which have never been published, in Jack Shadbolt In His Words (Figure 1 $40). Mertens also tapped into the large body of personal poems that Shadbolt wrote, revealing a sensitive, passionate, observant and determined man.

“The subject matter of Jack’s writings was ostensibly art,” writes Mertens, “but, like Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, they reveal the obsessive questioning of a soul on a vision quest.”

Shadbolt’s earliest memories are from his days growing up in Victoria’s Oak Bay neighbourhood. In relation to his older sister, Betty, he wrote, “I, slighter of limb, bigger of head (I was affectionately called “pumpkin head”), bright-eyed, eager. Full of enthusiasms, an incurable dreamer. All this from hearsay, of course.”

Jack Shadbolt seated by a study for one of his paintings. Photo courtesy of SFU Galleries, © Simon Fraser University.

In her old age, Jack’s mother wrote a long letter to him recounting the doctor and nurse at his birth saying that he was “one of a hundred born” and commenting on Jack’s “unusually big head.” Jack’s mother also noted that he was “something different,” and then follows with: “Your eyes were so large . . . and your face was so clear and settled already as if you had come for a purpose . . .having those great big eyes like you were looking at something we couldn’t see. We were never apart till you went to school at 5 yrs. I never let you out of my sight . . . You and I were always so close . . . and I, like you, always wanted to know why & what for and always being told to shut up, which only helps a child to think more. So I sense both you and I belong to a different tribe altogether.”

After school, Jack ran free in the meadows near his home, where he became sensitized to the natural world. “I went galloping off into the fields, my arms waving high and shouting my unbounded joy to the birds in the air,” recalls Jack. “Birds were the leitmotif of my life. I came to love the meadow larks, the bobolink’s call, the tiny wrens in the grass, the thrush in the woods, the call of a cock pheasant across the field, the rat-a-tat-tat of the red, black and white woodpeckers among the trees, the robins cocking their heads for worms, the black familiar crows. And the mysterious owls under the dark edge of the woods opposite my bedroom window.”

As an adult, Jack Shadbolt referenced the poet, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), when he called Oak Bay his “Fern Hill,” which is the title of a Thomas poem, an autobiographical evocation of a childhood “Garden of Eden” lost; but also, how that innocence can be reborn through art.

Young Jack Shadbolt (middle) with his mother, brother, Roy, and sister, Betty.

Certainly, Jack Shadbolt thought of his early childhood ecstasies in his later life, as indicated in one of his journals about a summer spent painting at his Hornby Island studio in 1979: “Ever since I can remember, wild fields of tawny grass have evoked a special magic for me. Painting all this past summer at Hornby Island, my studio was similarly located, and the nostalgia was powerful. In front of our deck, falling away over a field to the water, was deep tangled grass tufted with broom and briar roses and sparkling with white dog daisies: and across, the hills of the Vancouver Island Range. So when, during the end momentum of a hard-working three months, having exhausted my supply of canvas, I resorted to a package of large heavy water colour board I had on hand and just let it all go, I sloshed on the acrylic in viscous gobs and splashes and as it first dripped down the surface to suggest grass stems, I knew I had found my long delayed true theme. The result was an exciting relief formed as though I had been given a gift of childhood innocence again. I knew I was in for an orgy of recall, so I started to deliberately induce such moods as tawny grass, phalanxes of martial grass, barbaric grasses, flowered grasses after field-fire, long stemmed delicate grasses, dried autumn grasses flashing with colour—out they all came. My only job was to control their intricacies, to bank down the excitement into solid structural terms. In four hectic days I had produced twelve energetic paintings without once breaking rhythm.”

Jack was not only painting landscapes. These images were metaphors for something much deeper, for as he says, “An artist’s subject is only a convenient carrier for his subterranean involvement.”

In a letter, Jack described someone who had viewed his paintings of owls and said to him, “In a way I don’t understand you. At a time like this, why owls. Surely it would be more relevant to be dealing with the social scene?”

Jack Shadbolt with one of his his paintings of owls.

Jack didn’t have an immediate response although in his letter he outlined his defense: “In a sense everyone is the social scene. If I happen to be painting an owl, that’s also a human part of it. What’s going on inside us is also relevant even though outside we are witnessing Vietnam, the Black revolution, a life-style movement, an ecological wave, Amchitka, Quebec and all the rest. I’m only too aware of that. Maybe that’s why I need an owl or two for a time. It isn’t as though I paint the damned things all my life, anyway, but what if I did? Momentary social urgency always goes on outside; however you paint anything, sooner or later the urgency seeps into it. The deeper psychological soundings of guilt and unrest (if that’s what we crave) or the serenity (if that’s what’s needed) or the commitment (of attitude)—one can make an owl trivial or imply comment on our latent ferocity, our secret sadism, our alienation … In any case I reached over to my studio table and handed him a foolscap sheet on which I’d scribbled a poem the other day when I was resting between paintings. He confessed to a little surprise. I think he really thought I was being cute choosing owls—something to catch the public fancy. . . I have been flippant maybe saying it wasn’t me that chose them, they chose me—something from childhood experience in Pemberton woods in Victoria . . . And then ever since I first painted one I get such a constant demand for owls so I said OK let’s start there, communicating. It must be possible in even as serious a situation as that to communicate something deeper. That’s one part of it—but that’s not the whole of it. There is still the act of painting—experiencing how form works and creates its own meaning. By it speaking through a familiar subject one is really aware of the shock, how the form attitude changes the impact. And to come to realize how form works—that is one of the major experiences of life. So in answer to his “why owls?” I oppose (respectfully enough, I hope, but not too much so) “Why not?”

Mertens research and melding together of this collage of Jack Shadbolt does much to illuminate the artist and his work. Shadbolt’s poetry in particular is a revelation.

Why do I paint? I paint because I must.
But why must I? As Picasso would
answer, why must a bird sing?
– Jack Shadbolt

9781773272559

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